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For nearly 15 years, American politicians have been clamoring for a “pivot to Asia” as they rightly recognize the growing threat posed by China, and the need to realign our strategic priorities accordingly. Yet across multiple administrations, the will fades. American leaders have instead dedicated much treasure and precious strategic attention to the latest developments in the ongoing reordering of Europe, or whichever Middle Eastern intrigue they are told will bring legacy-burnishing breakthroughs.

As the D.C. blob and the Reddit-screaming consultant class speed us toward disaster, the American people no longer countenance the breadth of international commitments their leaders cling to. The gap between what the elite wish for and what the people will tolerate is where America’s greatest risk lies. Folly, blunder, catastrophe: all are squarely in our future if we don’t act now to change course.

Our leaders’ unwillingness to make painful tradeoffs does not save us from pain—it only saves them from accountability. In fact, their choices make unavoidable pain more unpredictable, and more serious.

Well, thank you, and thanks to all the gathered delegates and luminaries and media professionals.

And thanks especially to the hosts of the Munich Security Conference for being able to put on such an incredible event. We’re, of course, thrilled to be here.

And, of course, it’s great to be back in Germany. As you heard earlier, I was here last year as a United States senator. I saw Foreign Secretary David Lammy and joked that both of us last year had different jobs than we have now.

But now it’s time for all of our countries, for all of us who have been fortunate enough to be given political power by our respective peoples, to use it wisely to improve their lives.

I was fortunate in my time here to spend some time outside the walls of this conference over the last 24 hours, and I’ve been so impressed by the hospitality of the people, even, of course, as they’re reeling from yesterday’s horrendous attack.

And the first time I was ever in Munich was with my wife, actually, who’s here with me today on a personal trip. And I’ve always loved the city of Munich, and I’ve always loved its people.

And I just want to say that we’re very moved, and our thoughts and prayers are with Munich and everybody affected by the evil inflicted on this beautiful community. We’re thinking about you, we’re praying for you, and we will certainly be rooting for you in the days and weeks to come.

One particularly powerful obstacle that has quickly materialized against the Trump Administration is the federal judiciary. Lawsuits challenging Trump’s flurry of executive orders have been filed, and federal judges have begun placing temporary injunctions on the president’s EOs.

For example, U.S. District Judge for D.C. Royce Lamberth issued a restraining order that bars the implementation of President Trump’s EO that transgender prison inmates be housed in prisons corresponding to their biological sex. Two days later in Washington State, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour placed a hold on the president’s EO that refuses to interpret the 14th Amendment as automatically granting birthright citizenship to children born to non-citizens temporarily residing in the U.S., either legally or illegally.

While the Trump Administration is considering taking Greenland and Canada under its wing, there’s another foreign country America should watch over, in the way that a parent cares for a child: California.

If the Golden State were a nation, it would have the fifth-highest GDP globally: $3.8 trillion (more than India, and more than New York and Florida combined). It’s the most populous state, officially home to 39 million residents—eight million more than Texas. It has the most members of the House (52) and the most Electoral College votes (54).

California’s farms supply more than half of America’s fruits and vegetables, half our dairy, and every almond. The Central Valley, which spans 450 miles from Redding in the north to Bakersfield in the south, has 1% of U.S. farmland but produces 25% of Americans’ food.

California’s market power means that its laws affect 49 other states. In 2016, California adopted a “History Social Science Framework” for K-12 education to “feature the contributions of diverse peoples of all sorts to the story of California and the United States.” Publishers like McGraw Hill updated their textbooks nationwide to avoid printing a separate California edition. “LGBT” appears 21 times in the framework.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Press Pass Fail | The Roundtable Ep. 256

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Family Policy | Cincinnatus Series Ep. 4

In removing General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Trump made a necessary and long-overdue correction to a military leadership corps that has lost its way. For too long, the Pentagon has been governed by leaders more concerned with bureaucratic politics and ideological conformity than with the timeless requirements of combat: discipline, cohesion, and lethality.

America’s military is not merely a collection of well-equipped components—it is an institution forged by a distinct moral and martial tradition. Its strength has always come from a warrior ethos that prizes courage, merit, and excellence. Yet over the last two decades, that ethos has been eroded by a leadership class that increasingly serves the managerial regime rather than the nation it was sworn to protect.

In many ways, General Brown exemplified this decline.

His removal is not just about replacing one man—it is about reclaiming the military from an ideological project that has subordinated warfighting to the dictates of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Uniformed military officers have been active agents in this ideological capture, so it is only fitting to ensure accountability for this class of leaders.

It’s long past time to rein in the field of public administration, which supplies the bureaucrats who populate the administrative state. About 12,000 U.S. students a year graduate in the field, mainly at the master’s level through the Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree. About half of all MPA graduates end up in government, mostly at the state (25%) and local (15%) levels, but some (about 10%) at the federal level. This means that about 1,200 public administration graduates enter the federal bureaucracy every year, presumably in leadership and management-track roles.

Christi Grimm, a former inspector general in the Department of Health and Human Services, is one such MPA holder who did damage from the federal bureaucracy. Grimm issued a panicked report on COVID in its early days that President Trump viewed as an attempt to undermine his handling of the crisis (she has since sued for reinstatement after being fired shortly after Trump’s second inauguration). Another is Karen Chen, a senior analyst on environmental issues in the Government Accountability Office, who previously worked for Michael Bloomberg’s net-zero initiative for local governments that sought to counter policies of the first Trump Administration.

To prevent national security failures and mitigate them when they occur, the U.S. has built a national security state unlike anything humanity has ever seen. The U.S. government has a network of security intelligence and operations agencies that spans the world, working through a web of domestic and foreign governmental, nonprofit, and corporate institutions.

We outsiders think this network runs through the CIA. Yet as we are learning, thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), that is only partly true. In 2023, while the Intelligence Community, including the CIA, was appropriated $71.7 billion dollars, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an “independent” but supposedly State Department-guided agency, received about $40 billion. While USAID has the word “International” in its name, it has spent a lot of money not only spreading atheism in Nepal but also on woke dogma and censorship at home.

The Right has a rare opportunity to turn the tables on the administrative state—and also prepare the way for the great re-learning that America needs.

If you’re an American who works for a living, chances are good that between state and federal laws, insurance carrier requirements, and woke corporate Human Resources (HR) departments, you’ve had to endure “anti-harassment” trainings. These are delivered either in live group settings or via online modules that combine videos with quizzes, with only certain responses deemed acceptable. Some of the content has amounted to forced indoctrination in leftism to a captive audience—which was, of course, the point.

I work for the Claremont Institute, which leaders on the Right have called “America’s most consequential think tank”—and which even frequent critics such as the New York Times have had to admit is “a nerve center of the American Right.” Yet even on this island of sanity, we have had to devote multiple hundreds of staff hours to watching training videos that explain what is and is not acceptable to say and do in California’s woke legal environment.

It would be much more appropriate to stop the ideological chicanery and instead require employees in federal agencies to be trained on how to not harass American citizens.

“The strategy is to delay, postpone, obfuscate, derail.”

That was the U.S. Agency for International Development’s approach to protect its autonomy from the president. It had nothing to do with resisting Donald Trump and DOGE—this line was written three decades ago to resist reforms by Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s mild-mannered secretary of state.

The career bureaucrats and their aid-industrial complex won out. That marked the last shovelful of dirt on the grave of attempts to rein in USAID.

Until Trump and his DOGE team.

Recent revelations go beyond the imaginations of what many knew but could seldom prove. USAID has become an out-of-control agency spending billions a year in bloated crony contracts, rotten from top to bottom with systemic fraud, corruption, and politicization. USAID has a budget roughly triple the official budget of the CIA, and has become an unaccountable slush fund for a left-wing political machine. For decades, that slush fund paid the salaries and projects of activist consultants, policymakers, lawyers, journalists, entertainers, organizers, think tanks, universities, and NGOs.

My friends at the Claremont Institute have provided the intellectual underpinnings for President Trump’s executive order that attempts to end birthright citizenship and replace it with a rule that recalls the ius sanguinis rules of Old Europe.

According to the view advanced by participants in this symposium, including John Eastman, Ed Erler, Michael Anton (since departed for the Department of State’s Office of Policy Planning Staff), and my podcast host, the international woman of mystery Lucretia (yes, that is her official title), not only must a baby be born on American territory to become an American citizen, but the baby’s parents must also be in the country legally. I take them to mean that the parents must be either citizens or legal aliens, such as permanent resident aliens, but they cannot be in the United States illegally or even under short-duration visas, such as for tourists or students. I assume Claremont Institute scholars draw the line at citizens and green card holders because of Eastman’s argument in 2020 that Kamala Harris could not become vice president because she was born to parents who were in the U.S. on student visas.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Mr. Vance Goes to Germany | The Roundtable Ep. 255

After an Afghan national drove his car into a Munich crowd, J.D. Vance delivered a stern rebuke of the European ruling class. Unsustainable immigration, Islamic extremism, and censorship raise the question whether once-great nations can be relied on as true Western allies. Meanwhile back home, Democrats struggle to decouple from woke, but best not interrupt their mistakes. The guys sit down to talk foreign policy, DOGE’s popularity, and resistance 2.0—plus, recommendations for must-watch shows and must-read articles!

Recommended reading:

As the U.S. southern border begins to function once again, it’s time to consider what kind of immigration policy we should adopt. President Trump’s move to deport huge populations, upwards of 10 million just since 2021, could prove to be among the most decisive actions a president has taken in decades.

The Biden Administration’s oddly permissive policies ironically have stiffened Americans’ opposition to immigration across the board. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who wish to reduce all immigration has soared from 41% just two years ago to over 55% in 2024, although many still embrace legal migration.

Throughout his time in office, President Reagan was frequently called the “Great Communicator,” as he was blessed with a wealth of experience on the screen and possessed an actor’s natural sense of stage presence. But in his initial weeks in office, Donald Trump has put together a team whose power and effectiveness have dwarfed even Reagan’s substantial efforts.

It has long been said (usually with express or implied derision) that Trump picks senior staff because they will “look good on TV.” But even to the extent this is true, it is clear that Trump understands the centrality of communications for 21st-century governance in a way that his critics do not.

Just a week into Donald Trump’s presidency, Ben Shapiro, who endorsed Trump in the 2024 election but has never been the president’s biggest fan, expressed shock at the effectiveness of the Trump team’s communications work. He had “never seen anything remotely like this extraordinary level of effective quality agenda advocacy from a Republican administration in my lifetime. It’s jaw-dropping.”

Responding to Shapiro, conservative commentator John Hawkins wrote that “Reagan set the standard for grassroots Republicans from the eighties to the present…. Now, Trump is setting a new standard for both groups in his 2nd term.”

“It gets better with every minute,” agreed the popular Libs of TikTok account.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

IVF | Cincinnatus Series Ep. 3

The Fighting Irish may soon be fighting in court rather than on the gridiron. Few universities have practiced affirmative action in hiring longer than Notre Dame, as I document in a new report. Notre Dame’s provost even recently announced that increasing “the number of women and underrepresented minorities” on the faculty is a goal “equally important” to hiring Catholic faculty.

AUSTIN, Texas – President Trump’s recent deal with Mexico has that country deploying 10,000 troops to the border. But America’s commitments in agreement have gone insufficiently examined.

“For the first time, the U.S. government will work jointly to avoid the entry of guns to Mexico,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced to reporters.

That promise is in response to a years-old narrative that America’s love affair with guns helped create Mexican cartel monsters who poison Americans with fentanyl. This claim has been relentlessly advanced by Democratic lawmakers and progressive gun-control advocates. Trump’s recent concession to work on the “problem” has added heft to Mexico’s claim that it has nothing to do with its own cartel crisis—as when Mexico recently filed a $10 billion lawsuit against American gun manufacturers for allegedly turning a blind eye to gun smugglers.

“If you want to stop the trafficking of fentanyl to the U.S., if you want to stop the violence that’s leading to a lot of migration across the border, you’re going to need to stop the flow of guns to Mexico because that’s what’s leading to all these problems,” said Jonathan Lowy, an attorney representing the Mexican government in the case.

But this storyline has not aged well. It is so incomplete and devoid of up-to-date context as to qualify as an unproven claim at best, and a flagrant falsehood at worst.

American life today is characterized in no small part by nearly ceaseless exposure to LGBTQ propaganda. Everywhere you turn, you’re confronted with “the message,” be it in grade schools, on college campuses, while watching television or movies, or at work. There are no “safe spaces” sheltered from the deluge—not even FEMA’s hurricane recovery efforts have been spared.

How did such a small “community” capture America’s institutions? The answer is complex, but a new database by The Project to Expose Corporate Activism (PECA) shines a light on a significant part of the story.

PECA’s database shows that corporations have become the vanguard of the LGBTQ movement, donating vast sums of money to prop up an equally vast network of activists. The database does not merely rehash well-known examples like Anheuser-Busch’s support for transgender TikTok influencers but rather furnishes evidence of 1,588 companies’ support for more than 2,300 LGBTQ causes. These causes on the whole are quite radical. They range from Camp Brave Trails—a queer summer camp that has children’s drag shows and a “clothing closet for exploring gender expression”—to NGOs like Immigration Equality that facilitate the illegal migration of transgender and HIV+ “asylum seekers.”

Theatre is gay.

Don’t get me wrong—I love theatre. I’ve acted in college and community productions, worked backstage, directed high school plays, and attended a few dozen shows at various D.C. venues. 

But it’s very gay. 

It’s also—like much of the arts—resolutely Left. Playbills invariably frame the shows’ plots in progressive political terms, directors gleefully queer and gender-bend characters, and every theatre in town continued enforcing mask mandates long after they became a joke everywhere else.

So imagine my shock when D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, previously wreathed year-round in rainbow light, began instead to throw pure white illumination onto the dark waters of the Potomac. Theatre will remain at least somewhat gay, but get more based (a week ago, Trump announced Ric Grenell as the Kennedy Center’s interim executive director).

That wasn’t the end, though. Just hours later, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that the Kennedy Center’s days of hosting drag shows were over. “I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” he wrote. 

Many times over the last several years, Donald Trump’s political opponents on the Right claimed he was a drag on the Republican Party’s political prospects. This argument was never very plausible. The reversals that congressional Republicans suffered over the last six years (such as losing the House and Senate by narrow margins) were well within the normal range of the vicissitudes of electoral politics. But whatever meager credibility such criticisms may have possessed has now been completely laid to rest by President Trump’s astonishing return to power, bringing with him Republican control of both houses of Congress—a feat accomplished in the face of unprecedented opposition from some of the most powerful forces in American political life. Trump has proven himself to be a potent political force and a boost to the fortunes of his party.

Trump, however, will only be around for four more years. If the American Right is to continue to succeed after he has left the scene, it will have to learn the secrets of his success. This means admitting that Trump’s impressive wins are the fruit not of mere luck, nor even of his extraordinary energy, but of his even more extraordinary political astuteness. As the pollster Patrick Ruffini remarked, simply but profoundly, in an election night X post: “Donald Trump understands what politics is about at a fundamental level.”

Twenty years ago, my husband and I were at a party of grad students in Claremont, California, discussing the differences between Old Testament law and the New Covenant written on the hearts of man as described in the New Testament. At one point a male classmate jumped up, eyes wide with shock, saying “wait. WAIT…you guys actually believe this stuff? Like not ironically, not for the sake of the noble lie…. For real—you actually believe this?”

I remember nodding, and then laughing at the whole scene. His shock was genuine, and his comment carried no malice. He was an upper-class kid who had attended elite schools, and he had simply never met a young, devout intellectual before. The idea that a thinking person would openly, unabashedly believe in Christianity was shocking to him.

It’s difficult to remember now, but in the early 2000s young intellectuals on the Right did not dabble in religion. The dawn of a new millennium offered only two alternatives to the milquetoast, Clintonesque liberalism that had dominated the 1990s: libertarianism or George W. Bush’s evangelical “compassionate conservatism.” Tech bros or values voters.

As Donald Trump was sworn in as president for the second time, he was surrounded by the men who deplatformed and silenced him four years ago. Google CEO Sundar Pichai banned Trump from YouTube and removed his app, Truth Social, from Google Play. Mark Zuckerberg sat flanked by Republican politicians despite banning Trump on Facebook and Instagram following the January 6 protest at the Capitol.

Whether it’s due to political opportunism or a real change of heart, the tech moguls’ now cozy relationship with Trump is one of necessity. It was easy to censor someone they thought would never become the most powerful man in the country again.

The question of how conservatives should respond to Big Tech’s sudden embrace of Trump is an important one. For too long, conservatives have insisted on purity tests for their allies. This is less about making sure your allies won’t turn on you and more a strange insistence that every convert must be a true believer. The problem is that the Left abandoned this notion a long time ago to their benefit.

Consider what Zuckerberg said when he was on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He’ll be introducing a community notes type of fact-checking system to all Meta platforms, which will significantly reduce the mainstream media’s power over Americans’ free expression via third-party fact-checkers.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Your Not-So-Lying Eyes | The Roundtable Ep. 254

The captains of the tech industry have rapidly warmed to Trump. But are they sincere? Or is the whole thing just a cynical display of fealty to the new leader, only to be reversed as soon as power changes hands? It’s probably a mix of both—not only across the industry, but sometimes even within a single person.

A helpful test is to ask when a given figure’s rightward lurch occurred. Those that happened after the election are much more likely to be transactional. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman of OpenAI—who had previously been openly anti-Trump—seem to epitomize this category. Google’s Sundar Pichai likewise bent the knee, but was giving hostage-video vibes.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Higher Education Reform Part II | Cincinnatus Series Ep. 2

Like a herd of American buffalo, joy and high spirits have stampeded across America since January 20, 2025—Liberation Day! The country has been liberated from the bleak, suffocating prison of woke tyranny—and we will need all the determination we can muster if we are going to finally put an end to it. The spirit of Making America Great Again is once more at large in the land, stronger, more inspired, and more determined than ever.

It is hard to keep up with the astounding multitude of executive orders President Trump is signing in his first weeks in office. One deserves more attention than we might be inclined to give it: “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday.” It is focused on preparing “a grand celebration” of America on July 4, 2026, among “other actions to honor the history of our great Nation.” This includes the construction of the monument garden Trump tried to launch during his first term, now to contain 250 statues in honor of our nation’s birth.

Determining citizenship based on a birth certificate alone simplifies things immensely. Unfortunately, we no longer live in a world where that’s sustainable.

President Trump’s executive order interpreting the 14th Amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” qualifier as not including people here illegally or on nonimmigrant visas may not succeed in changing current practice. In fact, I expect the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roberts, will punt on the issue, pointing to Section 5 of the amendment, which says, “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” In other words, a law is required, not an executive order.

But whatever the immediate outcome, the president has already succeeded in bringing the citizenship question to the center of our political debate.

President Trump has already appointed more Supreme Court justices than any president in 50 years. He now has a chance to be the first president since Eisenhower to appoint a majority of the justices on the Court. If he does, he would solidify his place as one of America’s most consequential presidents, and he would lock the Court’s liberals out of power for a generation.

If President Trump waits for a vacancy, his opportunity to secure his legacy may slip away. It is possible that neither Justices Alito nor Thomas will retire before the 2026 midterms. And three other justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, will soon be older than 65, the common retirement age, and could in theory vacate their positions between the 2026 midterms and the conclusion of President Trump’s term. If the Democrats win the Senate majority in 2026, they will likely block any appointments President Trump would make to the Court in the interim.

To guard against this, within the first 100 days and without a single justice announcing their retirement, Trump should nominate at least two candidates for the Supreme Court. Alternatively, he could make as many as five nominations for the justices aged 65 or older. President Trump can specify that these nominations will vest upon a vacancy actually arising, and the Republican Senate should swiftly confirm the nominees.

With the federal government having long treated birthright citizenship as a requirement of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, President Trump’s executive order denying it to children of noncitizen, non-permanent resident mothers faces an uphill court battle. Still, opponents of birthright citizenship can hope that the result will elucidate Section 1’s much-debated “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” phrase and clarify whether an amendment is necessary to reinterpret it.

This issue is not trivial. My colleagues and I at the Center for Immigration Studies recently put together a preliminary estimate that illegal immigrant mothers gave birth to between 225,000 and 250,000 babies in 2023. That number is larger than the total number of births in any single state in 2023 except Texas and California. All of these children are automatically U.S. citizens, and through their birth they increase their parents’ chances of remaining in the country as well.

With the U.S.’s sub-replacement level fertility, isn’t having more children exactly what our country needs? “I want more babies in the United States of America,” Vice President J.D. Vance recently declared, and with good reason. Deaths will soon outnumber births in the U.S., bringing the risk of economic and cultural stagnation as our population ages.

The American people have made their voices heard. In giving Republicans unified control of Congress and sending President Donald Trump back to the White House, they told the world exactly what they want: a return to American greatness, prosperity, and security—in other words, the Golden Age of America.

As I begin my term in the U.S. Senate, I am humbled by the faith the people of Indiana have placed in me, and I am energized by the mandate the Republican Party under Donald Trump’s leadership received from voters nationwide. I pledge to deliver on my campaign promises and to put America first in everything I do.

Americans could not have been more clear: they are tired of failed policies, eroding values, and being a laughingstock on the world stage. They demand, and are entitled to, a government that works for them, not against them. 

It’s long past time their elected leaders actually fight for their interests—leaders unphased by the influence of special interests or foreign powers.

My agenda for this session of Congress is straightforward and unapologetic. Alongside my colleagues in the Senate, I plan to rebuild American industry, secure our borders, strengthen our military, and remove toxic influences from our culture. I am laser-focused on advancing this blueprint for national renewal. 

If 21st-century Republicans have an idol, a graven image we collectively worship, it is Gross Domestic Product. All discussion about the flourishing of our nation is reduced to GDP, and its increase is seen as an ironclad refutation of anyone who questions whether America is, in fact, flourishing. But GDP, as today calculated, is largely fake, disconnected from the actual production of value. Worse, flourishing-as-quantity is a destructive way to view our society. It was once commonplace that the value of very many things, a mother’s love or a scarlet sunset, was immense, but unmeasurable. We have forgotten this, to our detriment. To truly make America great again, a crucial first step is dethroning GDP as a measure of our greatness.

Yes, there is some benefit to having in our quiver of analytical tools an aggregate way to view additions to economic value, the production of new goods and services. Think of 20 men and women who do nothing except eat and drink what is at hand. They produce no value; the GDP of their little society is zero. If, however, they begin to produce anything, goods or services, they produce value. How to measure such production has, however, generated different approaches, and the method we use today, while it serves our desire for simple ways of viewing the world, conceals truth in order to serve political ends.

After years of political division and the Democrats’ abuse of the justice system, President Trump’s promise of “retribution” has set the stage for a defining moment in American history. In 2016, Trump confronted a similarly delicate task of balancing retributive justice and national unity. After threatening to “lock her up,” Trump famously declined to pursue charges against Hillary Clinton. He stated that such a move would be too divisive and did not “want to hurt her.” But now, with the stakes even higher, the demands for accountability—and perhaps retribution—have grown louder and more urgent.

The challenge Trump faces lies in pursuing justice without weaponizing it, or even appearing to weaponize it. Accountability is essential to restoring public faith in our government, but it must be handled with fairness and restraint. As Trump himself recently clarified, retribution is not about vengeance—it is about fairness and restoring integrity to institutions that many Americans rightly see as having betrayed their trust. To meet this challenge and complete the restoration of due justice, clemency must work in tandem with justice.

Trump and his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, must offer not only strict consequences for wrongdoing but also a path to rehabilitation to social and political life for those willing to admit fully their violations of the public trust.

The Trump Administration’s decision to contest the dominant interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment is a sign that we might be living in an era of regime politics.

Near the beginning of his Crisis of the Two Constitutions, Charles Kesler distinguishes “normal politics” from “regime politics”:

Normal politics takes place within an accepted political and constitutional order, and concerns means, not ends. That is, the purposes and limits of politics are agreed; the debate is over how to achieve those purposes while observing those limits. By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for the sake of what ends or principles. It unsettles any existing political order, as well as its limits. It raises anew the basic questions of who counts as a citizen, what are the goals of the political community, and what do we honor or revere together as a people.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Belt and DOGE | The Roundtable Ep. 253

Frederick Douglass once denounced the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford as constituting “an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies.” For the massive violence it did to both the Constitution and to the principles upon which that charter is based, that opprobrium is richly deserved.

Forty-one years later, the Court issued a decision that deserves, but has largely avoided, the same kind of vituperation. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court maintained that the Constitution, particularly the 14th Amendment, incorporated the British common law doctrine of birthright citizenship, and that America’s Founding Fathers intended that this doctrine should prevail in America.

For quality of constitutional and historical reasoning, Wong Kim Ark is every bit as defective as Dred Scott. Yet while Dred Scott is universally condemned, Wong Kim Ark’s conclusions are generally accepted, even if few today are familiar with the case. The pernicious shadow of Wong Kim Ark continues to poison our law and policy regarding immigration.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Higher Education Reform Part I | Cincinnatus Series Ep. 1

Kicking off the Cincinnatus Series, Claremont Institute president Ryan Williams is joined by Inez Stepman, Scott Yenor, and David Azerrad to discuss leftist agendas within universities, and the opportunity for state legislatures to pull the reins and reverse course. Among the levers for dismantling the radical ideological infrastructures are the creation of state-controlled accreditation agencies, funding restrictions, and a renewed focus on student outcomes. The guests discuss these topics, potential pitfalls, and more!

Recommended reading:

How Trump Can Make Universities Great Again

Edward Erler, John Eastman, Ryan Williams, Michael Anton, and Linda Denno have made powerful constitutional cases for limiting birthright citizenship. However, it is easy to get lost in the legal minutiae and fail to see the larger stakes. Behind the birthright citizenship debate, as with all major constitutional debates, is a fundamental political question: Who should be an American citizen?

President Trump should thank former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The implosion of his Iran-backed regime handed Trump the perfect setting to make history. During his first 100 days, President Trump should deliver a speech outlining a fresh U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and announcing the withdrawal of American troops from Syria.

The highly visible nature of a troop withdrawal would mark a clean break from the shortcomings of his predecessors. It would also allow President Trump to fulfill campaign promises with clear, concrete action—correcting the complications from his earlier Syria policy and opening the door to a new golden age of American foreign policy. The neoconservatism of the George W. Bush era failed miserably. The liberal-oriented strategies of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden years did not fare much better. Recent attempts at progressive-oriented approaches have proven equally problematic.

A coalition of commercial pornographers, styling themselves as the “Free Speech Coalition,” is asserting that Texas is threatening their First Amendment liberties by making them legally responsible for verifying the age of viewers who use their websites.

Anyone operating with a vestige of a moral compass, however, should sense something farcical in the pornographers’ preening efforts to claim the moral high ground. Yet given the state of precedent, they have reason to expect the Supreme Court to side with them and prevent Texas from enforcing a law to stop porn from flooding into children’s minds.

The process by which the nation’s highest court came to abet the industrial scale of pornography distribution might be fairly described as diabolical. And no, that’s not hyperbole. I use “diabolical” in the etymological sense espoused by Professor D.C. Schindler, in which a division (dia-ballo means “to divide”) is made between reality and appearance, and appearance is made to substitute for reality in a way that is simultaneously appealing but self-defeating.

Pornography generally, and the digital porn industry specifically, is diabolical both in its puerile appeals to consumers and the legalistic appeals it makes to the courts.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Cruel Kids and Theater Kids | The Roundtable Ep. 252

The uphill battle to restore common sense continues with Trump’s executive orders against gender ideology and transition for minors. Meanwhile, a rebellion against the liberal establishment takes joyous shape among normalcy-craving youth. Pinehill Capital president and We the People podcast host Gates Garcia joins the guys to discuss these vibe shifts and the extremely hinged reaction from the Left as they struggle to meet the positivity, branding, and hype of the Right.

Recommended reading:

The Cruel Kids’ Table

President Trump’s recent executive order, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” denies that the 14th Amendment grants automatic citizenship to children of illegal aliens born on U.S. soil. Furthermore, it directs the U.S. Department of State and federal agencies not to recognize those children as citizens nor grant them such privileges of citizenship such as being issued U.S. passports.

Numerous scholars have weighed in against the arguments presented in Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. They claim that a plain reading of the 14th Amendment, along with its historical context and the practice of citizenship both before and after its passage, and the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) are incontrovertible proof that birthright citizenship is an absolute right under the Constitution.

When I arrived in Arizona last October to participate in nearly a month of get-out-the-vote efforts, I knew the state would be one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds in the 2024 presidential election. Joe Biden had won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020, making Arizona a potential game-changer for the GOP. Talking to dozens of Grand Canyon State voters—especially younger ones—I became convinced that Donald Trump had tapped into something special. He had connected with the “normies” in a way that leads me to believe Arizona will remain Republican for years to come.

In Arizona, the youth vote—defined as voters between the ages of 19 and 30—proved decisive in Trump’s 2024 election victory. While Trump didn’t win the demographic outright, he made significant inroads, pulling 2% of support away from Kamala Harris and the Democrats. That shift helped him secure the state by a 5.5% margin.

Universities in Ohio value DEI over academic programs. From looking at the program reviews that three notable universities in the state recently undertook, however, this is not immediately obvious.

By all appearances, these institutions made assessments based mostly on budgetary metrics. Kent State University announced a four-year plan to cut nearly $70 million from its budget. The University of Toledo is suspending or consolidating 48 degree programs to save more than $21 million. Miami University has cut or consolidated 18 programs according to its new program prioritization process.

Programs with low enrollments, fewer majors, high faculty-to-student ratios, and little grant potential are also being put on the chopping block. While humanities used to have some of the highest enrollment numbers compared to other departments, they have seen enrollments collapse in the last several decades.

I expected the reaction to a recent op-ed I published calling for the end of birthright citizenship to be cantankerous. I even expected it to be hysterical—from the Left. I did not expect self-described “conservatives” to be just as hysterical as the Left, and to use precisely the same terms. “Nativist.” “Xenophobe.” “Bigot.” “Racist.” “White nationalist.” “White supremacist.”

One point I’ve been making for a while is that one faction of “conservatism”—let’s call it the anti-Trump wing, although the phenomenon long predates Trump—sounds and acts with every passing year more like a “conservative” subdivision of the Left. Like the Left, they don’t want to debate; they want to call those they disagree with evil. For what are those epithets supposed to mean, if not “evil”?

Whether or not to have birthright citizenship for the children of noncitizens is one such fundamentally political question. But like so many other political questions, this one is ruled out of bounds by scholars, lawyers, experts, pundits, and professional moralists.

The American people did not willingly, knowingly, or politically adopt birthright citizenship. They were maneuvered into it by the Left and by the Left-allied judiciary. They’ve never debated it or voted on it. They’ve simply been told that it’s required by the Constitution.

Before the Coronavirus pandemic gripped the American consciousness in early 2020, America was seized by a pandemic of another kind: a hysteria among the nation’s elites over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. The frenzy generated by the progressive-liberal press, Hollywood radicals, progressive politicians (both Democrat and Republican), the minions of the Deep State, academics, and law professors was unprecedented.

It was driven, for the most part, by the Trump Administration’s attempts to curtail illegal immigration by the adoption of a zero-tolerance policy for illegal border crossers; significant restrictions on asylum policies; the use of the National Emergencies Act to shift funds allocated for other purposes to build a border war; the use of the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers while their claims are evaluated; and the end of the long-standing “catch and release” policy.

But nothing engendered as much hysteria as the president’s bare suggestion that, in 2018—the year of the sesquicentennial of the adoption of the 14th Amendment—the policy of granting automatic birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens born in the United States should be ended.

President Trump’s second term thrusts the question of birthright citizenship to the forefront of American politics: should the United States automatically grant citizenship to any child who happens to be born on U.S. soil? Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution requires doing such a thing. Yet defenders of birthright shut down any debate by framing opposition as cruel and racist—and obviously wrong as a legal matter.

But there is a strong constitutional and moral case for limiting birthright citizenship. It’s the argument that led the Trump Administration to issue an executive order that defines a new status quo: going forward, children of illegal aliens won’t receive recognition of their citizenship by the U.S. Department of State or any other executive agency.

Start with the Constitution. The question of birthright citizenship goes back to the 14th Amendment, one of the three ratified in the immediate wake of the Civil War. The relevant portion reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The phrase at issue is “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (known as the jurisdiction clause). Proponents of birthright maintain that the phrase merely means subject to the laws and courts of the United States.

Claremont Institute scholars, including me, Ed Erler, Tom West, John Marini, and Michael Anton, President Trump’s incoming Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, have been contending for years—decades, really—that the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause does not provide automatic citizenship for everyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the circumstances. Other prominent scholars, such as the late University of Texas law Professor Lino Graglia, University of Pennsylvania Professor Rogers Smith, and Yale Law Professor Emeritus Peter Schuck, have come to the same conclusion based on their own extensive scholarly research.

There is an old European proverb: “Where two fight, a third one wins.”

Anyone with eyes to see the misaligned interests of our major industrial factions can see that an existential clash is coming between the climate industry and artificial intelligence. The under-asked question is how the patriot, who cares little for the discrete interests of either party but greatly about his country, should proceed.

For the last 30 years, American businesses and investors have tripped over themselves to remake their portfolios with a focus on “sustainable” energy. Governments have subsidized this industry to the tune of trillions and made men rich off of their collective participation in this cultish climate scheme.

Smart observers have noted there are many ways to combat the observed “climate crisis” besides a hyper-focus on carbon-emissions reduction. But none of these alternative strategies line the pockets of the forces that have set up financial, industrial, and political projects in support of the shift.

Innovations in solar, wind, and other non-coal/oil/gas energy production schemes are impressive—if you start with the premise that it is urgently necessary to move away from fossil fuels. The entire global project is a house of cards, and the moment someone credible says, “What if we don’t need to worry about that?” the foundational cards are removed and their wealth crumbles.

At the beginning of each presidential term, an inaugural address provides an opportunity for a president to set the tone for things to come through an artful articulation of principle, a considered reflection on the present and the future, and, at least on some occasions, an inspired political poetry that appeals to “the better angels of our nature.” Donald J. Trump’s Second Inaugural Address did much of this, but with the soaring poetry (which was ample enough) appearing only in the final section of the speech.

More than a few commentators have noted, not without justification, that Trump’s address on the 20th of January 2025 at times resembled a State of the Union Address more than a classic inaugural one. But there is a perfectly justified reason for this: President Trump and his supporters believe, rightly in my view, that the Left’s zealous commitment to DEI and the new racialism, transgender ideology, “saving democracy” by burying it, “lawfare” directed against political opponents (most notably Trump himself), and the censoring of free political speech in the name of fighting “misinformation” threatens the very fabric of our constitutional republic, along with its indispensable moral and cultural prerequisites. In these circumstances, it was not possible or appropriate to declare as a victorious Thomas Jefferson had done in 1801, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”